Erik Ten Hag has been eliminated from Manchester United and for the sixth time in just over ten years, England’s largest football club is looking for a new head coach.
Ten Hag is out because he wasn’t that good. He had won just one of his last eight games in all competitions. United had fallen to 14th after defeat to West Ham on Sunday, one season after finishing eighth, lower than ever before in the Premier League era. Underwhelming results and performance had become a pattern that felt increasingly irreversible over the past two months.
However, there is also a broader pattern that we must take into account, a pattern that should not necessarily acquit Ten Hag, but should deter potential successors.
Since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement in 2013, no United manager has lasted three years.
Five different men – six if you count Ralf Rangnick’s six-month interim spell – have been tasked with maintaining or restoring United’s eminence. They are recruited for different reasons, from different countries, with different levels of experience and influence. David Moyes was a Brit who had achieved success at smaller English clubs. Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho were big names and proven winners. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was a Man United legend. Ten Hag was a trendy loanee from Ajax in the Netherlands.
They all had a plan to form Manchester United. Everyone had their own attitude and style. Each came with his own tactical ideas, his own list of players to target, his own ideals. There are very few similarities that connect all five.
And yet they have all failed in a seat that feels more and more toxic every year.
Their only similarity is their shared experience at a declining club that, money and prestige aside, has done nothing to earn a place among England’s elite in the past decade.
In a sense, Ten Hag was one of the best of the five. His winning percentage was better than Solskjaer, Van Gaal, Rangnick and Moyes. His two trophies – the 2024 FA Cup and the 2023 League Cup – were equal to Mourinho’s. The circumstances he faced – rash of injuries, turmoil at board and ownership levels and uncertainty – were arguably more adverse.
So it’s foolish to portray him as the problem, as the clueless coach dragging a once-proud club to new depths.
He was the latest punching bag, the face of United’s many problems; but this is certainly not the main reason why these problems persist.
The problems over the years have been archaic structures, unqualified executives and poor player recruitment. The byproduct is a disjointed team of second-string players who, on paper and on the field, don’t fit together.
That’s what United’s next manager – Gareth Southgate? Zinedine Zidane? Xavi? Ruud van Nistelrooy, the interim? – will inherit. That, plus still high expectations, plus a backroom structure that still seems to be in flux.
The job is not impossible. But it requires reforms that go far beyond a coach’s mandate. These will fall under new co-owner Jim Ratcliffe; and his top sports deputy, Dave Brailsford; and CEO Omar Berrada, who was hired away from Manchester City; and sporting director Dan Ashworth.
The reforms are probably underway. But until the changes prove material… aside from a lucrative salary, why would a coach want this job?
Van Nistelrooy, a former United striker and most recently assistant at Ten Haag, will take charge until the club’s top brass find someone confident (or delusional) enough to take on the challenge.
And in the meantime, the 2024-2025 season, like a number of previous ones, already seems lost.
